lunes, 6 de diciembre de 2010

It's been a while since my last post. I've been really busy with iFacturas. As many of you already know, we were selected as top-25 most promising tech startups worldwide and we had to do a final pitch in Zaragoza, Spain last December 2nd to select the Innovate!2010 Startup of the Year. The event actually started on November 30th with rehearsals and a lot of feedback from mentors in order to be ready for the "big day". We are now happy to announce that we feel really honored to have been selected as number 21st in the world.

In other words, iFacturas was number 2 in Scandinavia, number 5 in Spain, number 13 in Europe and that is really awesome considering the level shown by the rest of former presenting companies.
Above all, the best thing was to see nice people again like Chris Shipley, Erica "Stategic" Lee, Tina Cassano, Ricardo Pedrol, and meet new great mentors such as Michelle Messina or Kimberly Cerrone.

It felt very nice to "re-meet" former startups "pitchers" such as Ari from Innovalley (she is incredibly nice and sweet), Luis and Pepo from Homing or the big winner of the competition, Xabier from Anboto, among many others from Germany, Turkey, Israel...Last but not least, I very much enjoyed meeting Matt and Jackie from Austin, Texas who shared with us their SocialSmack project. Fantastic guys, a really adorable couple! Best regards, pals!

I'm gonna miss Innovate!100 soooo much. I feel I've learnt a lot about the company I represent, about how to pitch our product and I've also learnt a whole lot about myself. In the last masterclasses, for instance, I was lucky to carefully listen to Rodrigo Sepúlveda's interview with Chris Shipley, and he provided a lot of valuable input to entrepreneurs and wannabes. Rodrigo, a really smart person with awesome skills for business but also to guess people's age and to reproduce any single accent of any language in the world, talked about his own personal experience being an entrepreneur and all he had to do in order to succeed. Really valuable, he shared his recommendations, his "dos and don'ts". Just perfect.

Zaragoza is in the past now. I'm now in Dusseldorf in the European Venture Summit and I've very excited. I pitched iFacturas this evening and after that I had the opportunity to talk to many potential investors on One2One meetings. I feel very glad and, eventhough "raising money is not a business model" (Rodrigo Sepúlveda dixit), even not being our business model, I must reckon that getting it will help iFacturas boost, go global and accelerate the whole succeeding process. I am sure we are going to succeed and if the investment is as close as I see it now, that's going to happen very, very soon. I've met awesome people and companies here as well.

That was the present and in the future, that's in a few hours, we'll continue in the European Venture Summit and then we'll fly to Oslo to attend VentureLab. I don't have the ability to write about the future yet, so in my next post I'll let you guys know about our second day in EVS and Oslo's event.